What is Weather Station?

Weather Station is a WordPress plugin whose purpose is to collect meteorological data from real weather stations and to display such data as texts, widgets and “real time” controls.

Depending on the capacities of the collected stations, this weather data may be accompanied by indoor comfort data or levels of pollution. In addition, Weather Station uses the collected data to calculate indexes – such as heat index or windchill – or to deduce some values – such as the cloud base altitude-. It also computes some astronomical calculations to produce ephemeris.

Who is this plugin for?

You probably think, from the previous lines, that this plugin is only for those who have a real weather station at the far end of their garden or on the roof of their house. Sorry for that, but you’re wrong 🙂

Actually, Weather Station can collect data from your own weather station (if you have one in this list) or from the hundreds of thousands of stations that their owners have decided to make public. So, if you do not have your own station, you can enjoy your neighbor’s station. And all for free! If you’re curious about choosing the “right” station, jump to the Add a Station section of this handbook.

How does it work?

After you have indicated the stations that interest you, Weather Station will regularly query them to get the most recent measured values. This data is then stored in the database of your WordPress site to be used by the various existing displays.Of course, you can add or remove stations to collect at any time.

How to display weather data?

To display the data of a particular station in a page, a post or a sidebar you can use the widgets provided by Weather Station, or you can add a control (a specific display, also provided by Weather Station) by inserting in your text a shortcode generated by the plugin.You can discover all the widgets and controls available in Weather Station on the showcase page.

Now that you know for who is Weather Station and how it works, let’s take a look at its dashboard!